Burnt Shadows [Paperback]

'In this brilliant book Kamila Shamsie opens a vista onto the century we have just lived through - pointing out its terror and its solace. She is so extraordinary a writer that she also offers hints about the century we are living through - the dark corners that contain challenges, as well as the path that leads to beauty's lair.' --Nadeem Aslam (author of Maps for Lost Lovers)

'Through its succession of seemingly disparate, acutely observed worlds, Burnt Shadows reveals the impact of shared histories, hinting at larger tragedies through individual loss'
--Maya Jaggi, The Guardian

`This is an unnervingly ambitious canvas, but the quality of Shamsie's writing swiftly draws you in and proves strong enough to carry it. A tremendous, impressive and thoroughly enjoyable book' --Daily Mail --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'An absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense strength' - Salman Rushdie 'A brilliant book she is so extraordinary a writer' - Nadeem Aslam 'I feel that I have travelled the world and spent the past six decades with Hiroko and her family. Burnt Shadows is a beautiful, beautiful book' - Tahmima Anam 'Audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope. One can only admire the huge advances she has made, and helped us to make, in understanding the new global tensions' - Anita Desai

'Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world's many tragedies and histories shape one another, and about how human beings can try to avoid being crushed by their fate and can discover their humanity, even in the fiercest combat zones of the age. Burnt Shadows is an absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response.'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"The most ambitious novel yet by this talented writer. In Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie casts her imagination far and wide"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

`Its breadth and depth are wonderful...Beautifully paced, and delicately written;the past evoked with such lyricism and pain...it has such tenderness.'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'How marvellous Kamila Shamsie is...I hope she wins every prize there is...I hope a lot of people read it.'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

It's fantastic. It's what fiction can and should do. I have not read Kamila's work before, but I will go back in and read it all now. I am reminded of Lorca when I read this book and feel that she has found the pulse of the wound that probes through to the opposite side .... Wonderful! It will be one of the year's best
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Burnt Shadows is a historical novel for our times. Kamila Shamsie reaches across races, decades and continents. She is, as Salman Rushdie says on the cover, "a writer of immense ambition". I read it with admiration for her historical imagination' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Shamsie's awesome new novel which spans six decades and the entire globe, from Japan via Delhi to New York and Afghanistan' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'the author deserves credit for tackling terrorism and its causes' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the author of four previous novels: In the City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award - both awarded by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie lives in London.